Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters
Page 1
A Note to the Readers of the Electronic Edition of Fragments
Fragments was originally formatted for hardcover publication, and though every effort has been made to simulate the original book’s layout and design features for the electronic edition, the arrangement of the e-book text does not always correspond to the original version. The transcripts of Marilyn Monroe’s writing feature text in various colors, indicating where editors have made corrections for clarity; on a black and white device, the alterations will not be differentiated. Finally, to adapt the book to an electronic format, image resolution has been reduced. For higher resolution versions of all of the images, please consult the hardcover edition.
CONTENTS
Editors’ note
Personal note (1943)
Undated poems
“Record” black notebook (around 1951)
Other “Record” notebook (around 1955)
Waldorf-Astoria stationery (1955)
Italian agenda (1955 or 1956)
Parkside House stationery (1956)
Roxbury notes (1958)
Red livewire notebook (1958)
Fragments and notes
Kitchen notes (1955 or 1956)
Lee and Paula Strasberg
Letter to Dr. Hohenberg (1956)
Letter to Dr. Greenson (1961)
Written answers to an interview (1962)
SUPPLEMENTS
Some books from Marilyn Monroe’s library
The favorite photo
Funeral eulogy by Lee Strasberg
Chronology
Literary constellation
Acknowledgments
EDITORS’ NOTE
Norma Jeane Mortenson was born under the sign of Gemini, and she described herself as having two natures: “Jekyll and Hyde, two in one.” Even the initials of her stage name (which, according to one story, were suggested to her by the clearly visible “M”s formed by the lines of her palms) supported this duality, as did the pseudonym, Zelda Zonk, that she used while escaping incognito from Hollywood to New York.
In her lifetime, under pressure from the studios, the media created a joyful and radiant image of Marilyn Monroe, even to the point of making her out to be a “dumb blonde.” One remembers her parts in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Seven Year Itch, How to Marry a Millionaire, and Let’s Make Love. Anything contrary to this artificial image was not welcome. There was no room for a melancholic Marilyn. The icon was not allowed to have an opposite side.
Yet, like a medal, she did have two sides. The sunny and luminous one of the sparkling blonde, and the darker one of the excessive perfectionist who sought absolutes and for whom life (work, friendships, and love affairs) could only lead to disappointment. “I think I have a gay side in me and also a sad side,” Marilyn confided in an interview.
Her friend Marlon Brando expressed perfectly the shock people felt when her death was announced: “Everybody stopped work, and you could see all that day the same expressions on their faces, the same thought: ‘How can a girl with success, fame, youth, money, beauty…how could she kill herself?’ Nobody could understand it because those are the things that everybody wants, and they can’t believe that life wasn’t important to Marilyn Monroe, or that her life was elsewhere.”
There are thousands of photographs of this icon. Her image has been used in many, sometimes brutal, ways. But in this book a new world of truthfulness and overwhelming clarity is being thrown open. A hitherto unknown and unseen Marilyn is revealed.
On her death in 1962, Marilyn Monroe’s personal possessions were bequeathed to Lee Strasberg, and when he in turn died in 1982, his young widow, Anna Strasberg, inherited this large and uncataloged collection, which included dresses, cosmetics, pictures, books, receipts, and so forth. Many years later, while sorting out Lee Strasberg’s papers, she found two boxes of poems and other manuscripts written by Marilyn. Not knowing what to do with these, she asked a family friend, Stanley Buchthal, for advice. Some months later, at an art collectors’ dinner, Stanley told Bernard Comment, a French essayist and editor, about Anna Strasberg’s find in order to get his opinion of the unpublished materials. That was the start of the adventure that became this book.
As far as has been possible to determine, the texts are placed in chronological order. Words printed in red are the editors’ and correct spelling mistakes, add missing words, or suggest possible readings of indecipherable words. The ordering of fragments of very disparate documents has been an attempt at reconstruction and hence at interpretation. The flow of Marilyn’s thoughts on individual pages, and from one successive page to another, is indicated by red arrows (black arrows are Marilyn’s own).
It is possible that other texts written by Marilyn will surface in the years or decades to come. For the moment, this book contains every available text, excepting her technical notes on acting. In any case, these writings reveal a young woman who was dissatisfied with issues of surface appearance and who was seeking the truth at the heart of both things and people.
Only lovers of clichés will be surprised that the Hollywood actress was passionately fond of literature, although this fact cannot be illustrated merely by the pictures collected in this book. (Still: how many actresses from that period do we know who sometimes took pains to be photographed reading or holding a book?) In a 1960 interview with the French journalist Georges Belmont, Marilyn recalled the beginning of her career: “Nobody could imagine what I did when I wasn’t shooting, because they didn’t see me at previews or premieres or parties. It’s simple: I was going to school! I’d never finished high school, so I started going to UCLA at night, because during the day I had small parts in pictures. I took courses in the history of literature and the history of this country, and I started to read a lot, stories by wonderful writers.” Her library contained four hundred books, ranging from such classics as Milton, Dostoyevsky, and Whitman to contemporary writers, including Hemingway, Beckett, and Kerouac.
Arthur Miller played a part in her development as a reader, too, recommending Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, which she devoured. But some years before they were involved, Marilyn had already tackled James Joyce’s Ulysses.
As we know, Marilyn inspired numerous painters: Dalí, De Kooning, and Warhol, among others. She also felt a real interest in painting—in the painters of the Italian Renaissance, such as Botticelli; Goya, especially his demons (“I know this man very well, we have the same dreams, I have had the same dreams since I was a child”); Degas, whose ballet dancer she gazed at in wonder when taken to see a private collection; and also Rodin, whose Hand of God she admired at length in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
From all these examples emerges a cultured and curious Marilyn who had a strong desire to understand others, the outside world, destiny, and, of course, herself. She took notes, swiftly setting down her feelings and thoughts and expressing her wonder. Some may be surprised at her spelling mistakes, in which, most probably, a form of dyslexia is detectable. But readers of Marcel Proust’s correspondence (Marilyn read Swann’s Way on the set of Love Nest in 1951) will have seen worse. The very Proust who, answering the question “to which failings are you most lenient?” replied unhesitatingly, “spelling mistakes,” and who, in one of his letters, wrote this strange and beautiful phrase: “Each spelling mistake is the expression of a desire.”
The collection of documents revealed here is nothing less than a treasure trove. We owe its appearance to Anna Strasberg and her sons, Adam and David, who, during the preparation of this book, have embraced the opportunity to uncover a hitherto under
valued, even unknown dimension of Marilyn’s personality. From beginning to end we have shared their desire to create a book that, we would like to think, would have pleased its author. Marilyn once confessed to a journalist: “I think Lee probably changed my life more than any other human being. That’s why I love to go to the Actors Studio whenever I’m in New York.” Perhaps Strasberg, more than other people, had sensed who Marilyn really was.
One of the remarkable insights these documents offer is the sense that Marilyn was, until the end, planning for the future. Among other projects, she hoped over time to play the great Shakespearean roles, from Juliet to Lady Macbeth. She also pursued her idea of creating a new production company in association with Marlon Brando.
Some texts will give rise to interpretation and comment. But there is nothing dirty or low, no gossip in this book; that was not Marilyn’s way. What the notes reveal is intimacy without showiness, the seismic measuring of a soul. They take nothing away from Marilyn’s mystery but rather make the mystery more material. She was an elusive star with a magnetic force that sent compasses haywire whenever she got close.
To this day, her face, her eyes, her lips appear all around the world. Innumerable actors and pop singers take her as a reference, a definitive model: to sound like her, to act like her, in advertisements and music videos and films. Songs are composed for her—among them this famous one, by Elton John and Bernie Taupin: “Goodbye Norma Jeane (…) / Loneliness was tough / The toughest role you ever played / Hollywood created a superstar / And pain was the price you paid / Even when you died / Oh the press still hounded you / All the papers had to say / Was that Marilyn was found in the nude.”
This book does not attempt to show her stripped bare but, rather, simply as she was. Through these poems and written papers, she’s more alive than ever.
Stanley Buchthal
Bernard Comment
Jim Dougherty and Norma Jeane, Catalina Island, fall of 1943
PERSONAL NOTE
1943
Norma Jeane married James Dougherty when
she turned sixteen, the age of consent in California,
on June 19, 1942, thereby escaping the threat of
being returned to an orphanage when her foster
family moved out of state. Dougherty was born in
April 1921 and was five years older than she was.
At the end of 1943, the young couple settled for
a few months on Catalina Island off the coast of
Los Angeles, a fashionable resort before the war.
It is likely that this long note, uncharacteristically
typed, was written at this time.
One can’t help being surprised, even impressed,
by the maturity of this seventeen-year-old girl,
whose feelings of disillusionment are plain from the
first sentence, as she examines her marriage and
what she expects from life, and faces the fear of her
husband’s betrayal. Nevertheless, the
disjointedness of the text reveals turbulent
emotions.
The “other woman” she mentions might be
a reference to Doris Ingram, her young
husband’s former girlfriend and a
Santa Barbara beauty queen.
The couple were divorced on
September 13, 1946.
Marilyn during the filming of Niagara, 1952
Marilyn reading Heinrich Heine
UNDATED POEMS
Marilyn Monroe wrote poemlike texts or fragments on loose-leaf paper and in notebooks. She showed her work only to intimate friends, in particular to Norman Rosten, a college friend of Arthur Miller with whom she became very close. A Brooklyn-based novelist, he encouraged Marilyn to continue writing. In the book he wrote about her (Marilyn Among Friends), he concluded, “She had the instinct and reflexes of the poet, but she lacked the control.”
It is likely that the poetic form, or more generally the fragment, allowed her to express short, lightning bursts of feeling—but who could hear that frail voice, the very opposite of the radiant star? Arthur Miller wrote strikingly: “To have survived, she would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was. Instead, she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.”
Life—
I am of both of your directions
Life
Somehow remaining hanging downward
the most
but strong as a cobweb in the
wind—I exist more with the cold glistening frost.
But my beaded rays have the colors I’ve
seen in a paintings—ah life they
have cheated you
Note: Marilyn apparently wrote several variations on the theme of the twofold course of life (“life in both directions”) and the delicate, sometimes invisible “cobweb,” revealed by dew and resistant to wind—in particular a poem entitled “To the Weeping Willow” that was published in Norman Rosten’s book about Marilyn: “I stood beneath your limbs / And you flowered and finally / clung to me, / and when the wind struck with the earth / and sand—you clung to me. / Thinner than a cobweb I, / sheerer than any—/ but it did attach itself / and held fast in strong winds / life—of which at singular times / I am both of your directions—/ somehow I remain hanging downward the most, / as both of your directions pull me.”
Oh damn I wish that I were
dead—absolutely nonexistent—
gone away from here—from
everywhere but how would I do it
There is always bridges—the Brooklyn
bridge—no not the Brooklyn Bridge
because But I love that bridge (everything is beautiful from there
and the air is so clean) walking it seems
peaceful there even with all those
cars going crazy underneath. So
it would have to be some other bridge
an ugly one and with no view—except
I particularly like in particular all bridges—there’s some
thing about them and besides these I’ve
never seen an ugly bridge
Stones on the walk
every color there is
I stare down at you
like those the a horizon—
the space / the air is between us beckoning
and I am many stories besides up
my feet are frightened
from my as I grasp for towards you
Only parts of us will ever
touch only parts of others—
one’s own truth is just
that really—one’s own truth.
We can only share the
part that is understood by within another’s knowing acceptable to
the other—therefore so one
is for most part alone.
As it is meant to be in evidently in nature—at best though perhaps it could make
our understanding seek
another’s loneliness out.
I can’t really stand Human
Beings sometimes—I know
they all have their problems
as I have mine—but I’m really too tired for it. Trying to understand,
making allowances, seeing certain things
that just weary me.
On Hospital gowns
My bare
(darrie) derrière
is out the air
in the air
when I’m not aware
aware
several
Handel Concertos
Vivaldi Concertos
Benny Goodman
My (pair)
Beethoven
Last 6—quartets
Ravel—the Waltz
Bartok—quartets of his
continued on other side
of list of records
Marilyn in the garden of Hotel Bel-Air, Los Angeles, 1952 Marilyn reading Joyce’s Ulysse
s, Long Island, summer of 1955
“RECORD” BLACK NOTEBOOK
AROUND 1951
As she often did, Marilyn filled only a few pages of this notebook, about twelve out of the hundred and fifty it contains and at obviously distinct periods. The first pages open with a heartfelt “Alone!!!” followed by reflections on fear and feelings that can’t be put into words; these were probably jotted down in response to acting classes, which may have been those given by Michael Chekhov that she started attending in September 1951. On page 135 of the notebook, there is a poignant text about the panicky fear that sometimes overtook her when she was about to shoot a scene because of her dread of disappointing; her deep-seated sense that, despite the good work she had done, the bad outweighed it, sapping her confidence. Here the language is very strong: “depressed mad.”
On page 146, she jotted down in pencil one of the few lines she delivered in Love Nest (1951), a film by Joseph M. Newman, in the supporting but nonetheless crucial role of Roberta Stevens, who was the former wartime (girl?)friend of the hero, Jim Scott. The notes on pages 148 and 149 of the notebook indicate diligent reading on the Florentine Renaissance, unless they are class notes from courses she attended at UCLA in the fall of 1950, after she had already begun acting in films. However, this school-like exercise is surrounded by an older story that most likely preceded her star status, as she writes of traveling in a crowded bus. Could this have been the same bus in which she met sixty likable Italian sailors, then a headily perfumed Filipino boy, ending up, half-crushed by a sleeping five-year-old almost slipping from his young mother’s arms, in the middle of sailors far too young to feel sad?